As a story, Gaudé’s latest is a modest accomplishment itself, but it is rich in philosophical possibilities that make it...
In this allusive and allegorical tale, a French intelligence officer chases an unlikely quarry across continents.
Assem Graieb—his pseudonym redolent of Abu Ghraib, the infamous prison—is “a killer for the Republic, constantly on the hunt for new targets.” His travels have taken him from France to Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and now he’s after an American, “a solid guy” who has gotten caught up in the drug trade out of Afghanistan, his mission to assess and then eliminate. Along the way, he falls in with Mariam, an archaeologist who hides an ancient statue in his luggage, the safest hiding place she can think of. The statue, of an ancient deity, is just a step ahead of being erased from history by the idolatry-despising foot soldiers of the Islamic State group, and Sullivan Sicoh, the object of Assem’s hunt, wouldn’t hesitate to put it on the market alongside his other wares. They have their rationale, and so does Mariam, and so does Assem. The story would be a terse procedural if confined to this century, but Prix Goncourt winner Gaudé complicates it with interspersed tales of other warriors across the centuries, from Hannibal to Ulysses S. Grant and Haile Selassie (“He is just a rat fleeing from the eyes of the Italian eagle that wants to devour him”), none of them strangers to desperate fights. Gaudé’s purpose in blending these characters from many times and places is not immediately evident, but he writes with a philosophical eye to history and the constant, unerring habit of time to want to obliterate all the accomplishments of our kind: “And he knows in that instant,” Gaudé writes, poetically, “that everything has truly been erased, that he has managed to escape from who he was."
As a story, Gaudé’s latest is a modest accomplishment itself, but it is rich in philosophical possibilities that make it memorable.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60945-500-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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